Asked by CNN debate moderator Wolf Blitzer if the United States
should continue providing foreign aid to Pakistan, Bachmann--a member
of the House Intelligence panel--showed she knows her Pakistan brief.

"Pakistan has been the epicenter of dealing with terrorism," she
said. "It is one of the most violent, unstable nations that there is."

Then--perhaps prompted by the fairly fluent and informed response on
Pakistan given by former China envoy Jon Huntsman on the
issue--Bachmann went on to cite some eyebrow-raising concerns posed by
the unstable, nuclear-armed south Asian nation:

"We have to recognize that 15 of the sites, nuclear sites are
available or are potentially penetrable by jihadists," Bachmann said.
"Six attempts have already been made on nuclear sites. This is more
than an existential threat. We have to take this very seriously."

Live-blogging the debate last night, your Yahoo News correspondent wondered if that information might have come from a classified intelligence briefing. And evidently, said correspondent did not wonder alone:

The information came not from a classified intelligence briefing but, rather, from a recent article by Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder in the Atlantic Monthly--a sister site of the National Journal--according to the Huffington Post.

As Goldberg and Ambinder reported in their Pakistan dispatch:

"At least six facilities widely believed to be
associated with Pakistan's nuclear program have already been targeted
by militants. [...] If jihadists are looking to raid a nuclear
facility, they have a wide selection of targets: Pakistan is very
secretive about the locations of its nuclear facilities, but satellite
imagery and other sources suggest that there are at least 15 sites
across Pakistan at which jihadists could find warheads or other nuclear
materials."

Bachmann concluded her Pakistan response at Tuesday's debate by
characterizing the troubled south Asian nation as "too nuclear too
fail." That phrase apparently originated with Brookings South Asia
expert Stephen P. Cohen, who shared the coinage with Ambinder and
Goldberg, the Huffington Post notes.

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